Loveland officials see fracking's dark side

Southern Weld County tour an eye-opener for councilors

By Tom Hacker Reporter-Herald Staff Writer

Posted:
11/09/2012 05:36:33 PM MST

Updated:
11/09/2012 05:36:47 PM MST

Sierra Club researcher Shane Davis, right, tells Loveland City Manager Bill Cahill and Mayor Cecil Gutierrez on Friday about the hazards resulting from emissions at a natural gas well located within a city park in Frederick in southern Weld County.
(Tom Hacker)

Editor's note: This is an update to an earlier Reporter-Herald story.

LONGMONT -- Two new schools, a church, a library and a medical clinic sit cheek-by-jowl with oil and natural gas wells in two adjacent southern Weld County towns.

A Loveland delegation led by City Manager Bill Cahill and Mayor Cecil Gutierrez visited all of them on Friday.

They traveled aboard a city bus through the heart of the Wattenberg gas and oil field to see, hear -- and even smell -- what happens when a community's development collides with the quest for energy independence.

"OK, now. Think with your nose," said Shane Davis, oil and gas research and information director for the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Sierra Club.

Davis was walking past a playground and picnic pavilion at the Frederick Recreation Area toward a Noble Energy gas well, where venting chemicals permeated the surrounding air.

"Can you smell that?" he asked, as a dozen people followed. "It's pretty strong today."

Loveland, like other communities up and down Colorado's Front Range, is caught in a dilemma.

New technologies for hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," and horizontal drilling extend the reach of the world's largest energy producers. Oil and gas exploration and development now encroaching on population centers previously untouched by their industry.

'We're Lucky'

Elected officials and planners in those towns and cities are wrestling with ways to balance community health, safety and quality of life with private property rights and the need for new sources of energy.

"We're lucky," Gutierrez said after the first tour stop in Firestone, where oil and gas wells were operating less than 100 feet from a new home, and inside the state-mandated 350-foot setback from a new charter school.

"We can be proactive. They weren't."

Davis' "Tour de Frack," as he calls it, has become a popular circuit for groups, including city officials, interested in seeing just how pervasive the oil and gas industry's most undesirable consequences can be on Colorado's landscape.

Loveland, in the face of rising interest from producers in oil and gas deposits that underlie the city's eastern fringe, has placed a moratorium on production that extends through February.

And city officials are spending that time looking at ways policy can protect their constituents from what they saw Friday.

On The Edge

"Luckily, this kind of density is like nothing we would ever see in Loveland," Cahill said near the end of the tour. "We're on the very edge of this. And, we have time."

The towns of Frederick and Firestone are very near the center of the vast Wattenberg oil and gas field, an oval that extends from northern metro-Denver through much of Weld County and portions of eastern Boulder and Larimer counties.

Some petroleum industry analysts say it contains, even after decades of exploitation, more than 3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Oil is also a target, locked in the Niobrara shale formation that closely follows the Wattenberg contours, where global giant Anadarko Petroleum Corp. has two permits pending just outside Loveland's city limit.

Loveland development services director Greg George and City Attorney John Duval, the two senior staffers who are crafting Loveland's proposed oil-and-gas regulation ordinance, also had keen eyes on the southern Weld scene.

"I hadn't driven around that area," George said. "I had no clue. When you get out into the open, and look out on the horizon, you see how consistent it is. It's everywhere."

Pinched on a narrow strip between Coal Ridge Middle School and a King Soopers-anchored retail center in Firestone, Canadian natural gas producer Encana Corp. operates 12 wells, some within the 350-foot setback that state regulations specify.

The reason for the proximity: The wells were there long before the school or the store.

"A failure of planning" is how Gutierrez described the haphazard mash-up of wells, houses, schools and other buildings.

"We don't have to allow that to happen," he said. "We will not allow that to happen."

Loveland's regulatory process relies heavily on work done by Greeley, where numerous oil and gas wells are located within the city.

Reaching a Balance

It also steers clear of Longmont's regulations, deemed by the state attorney general to be so much in conflict with state law that he filed suit against the city.

Longmont's position is now complicated by Tuesday's voter-approved measure calling for an outright ban on hydraulic fracking in the city, one that almost certainly will draw another legal challenge.

Loveland likely will pursue "enhanced" measures that producers and the city would voluntarily agree to, George said.

"It's a balance that we have to reach," he said. "We will be trying to deal with regulations that would otherwise be preempted by state law."

He said conversations that he and Duval had with Anadarko gave rise to optimism.

"They were open-minded to some additional air quality measures, well beyond what the state requires," George said.

Air quality was a prime focus of Friday's trip, as the bus swung into a housing development where the venting of "volatile organic compounds," a family of toxic chemicals known by the shorthand VOCs, from a gas well was visible in the clear morning air.

"Wow. You can see it. Clearly," Loveland councilor Joan Shaffer said. "How would you like to live next door to that?"

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